1. Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to the field of wireless communication and networks and generally to a healthcare program service provided through a wireless communication network using the Internet and/or portable terminals, and in particular, to a system and method for providing a healthcare program service based on vital signals and condition information.
2. Description of the Related Art
Generally, to have the benefit of a medical service, a patient must visit the hospital or the public heath center offering the medical service in person. However, the rapid progress of the network technology has facilitated the supply of various Internet-based healthcare system services, allowing the patient to easily check his/her health condition. Regarding the conventional healthcare system, Korean Patent Application No. 10-2003-0008295, entitled ‘Internet-Based Healthcare System and Method thereof’, discloses a technology of receiving a variety of vital information, such as Heart Rate Variability (HRV), vital warmth, blood sugar level, and body fat scale, over the Internet, diagnosing the health condition in real time depending on the received vital information, and transmitting the results back to the user over the Internet, thereby allowing the user to manage his/her own health condition. However, this technology is a mere technology of gathering vital information and diagnosing the health condition depending thereon. In addition, Korean Patent Registration No. 10-072770, entitled ‘System and Method for Providing Health Food Prescription Information through Healthcare’, and Korean Patent Application No. 10-2000-0041126, entitled ‘Health Diagnosis over Internet and Food Marketing Service Method Based thereon’, disclose a technology of receiving a user's vital information measurement data over the network, and recommending prescription information for the health food associated with the vital information measurement data, or recommending appropriate foods to sell them.
However, the above-stated technologies are merely based on a fragmentary functional scheme other than the personalized service where the information of each individual is separately taken into account. Therefore, there is a demand for a learning-based healthcare program recommendation service in which the user's experience information is reflected.
In this context, along with the popularization of Ubiquitous Health (U-Health) in which prevention, diagnosis, treatment, after-service, and healthcare service are available anytime, and anyplace by connecting the information communication to healthcare programs for various diseases, such as stress, hypertension, glycosuria, etc., have recently been developed, and are expected to be provided over the Internet and/or portable terminals. In addition, it is expected that various programs will be provided by enterprises and web sites supporting their care programs for specific diseases.
Therefore, when U-Health is more popularized, the user enjoying the healthcare programs in the on-line environment is expected to face the problem that the user must select, in person, the healthcare program most suitable from among the various healthcare programs provided. As a solution to this problem, there is a scheme in which the web site supporting healthcare programs summarizes the information to the users and delivers the summarized contents to the users so that the users may select the trustable healthcare programs in person. However, this approach, as it provides the same information to all users, has a restriction on its capability, given that the information of a healthcare method effective to other persons may not necessarily be appropriate to the corresponding user.
To address the restriction, therefore, there is a long demand for a scheme for recommending the healthcare program expected to be most proper to the disease of an individual based on vital signals and condition information of the individual